Personal Modernisms

Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes

James Gifford

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781772120097
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Gifford's invigorating work of metacriticism and literary history recovers the significance of the "lost generation" of writers of the 1930s and 1940s. He examines how the Personalism of anarcho-anti-authoritarian contemporaries such as Alex Comfort, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Durrell, J.F. Hendry, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Treece forges a missing link between Late Modernist and postmodernist literature. He concludes by applying his recontextualization to four familiar texts by Miller, Durrell, Smart, and Duncan, and encourages readers to re-engage the lost generation using this new critical lens. Scholars and students of literary modernism, twentieth-century Canadian literature, and anarchism will find a productive vision of this neglected period within Personal Modernisms.

1 Late Modernism Inside the Whale The Shape of Literary Criticism

This project is metacritical in many respects, responding more to the critical discourse, at least initially, than to the primary texts themselves. As a remedy against such a form of inward-looking scholarship, these metacritical corrections require an empirical form of address, which will develop in the “Narrative Itinerary” second chapter and its mainly historical approach. However, this metacritical approach requires an outline of how and why criticism grew to its current form. This chapter not only surveys the state of current scholarship but reconstructs the narrative of how such scholarship developed and what critical choices led to our current topical interest as well as our occlusions and interpretive biases. My attention here is on the development of critical views in literary scholarship, so I beg my readers’ patience until the next chapter rebuilds the narrative history of this period, and I also ask forgiveness for the inevitable repetitions this entails, especially with regard to forging the connections between geographically dispersed groups.

Since the development of the New Modernist Studies, the notion of Late Modernism has grown significantly. Alan Wilde’s Horizons of Assent carried forward the ideological distinctions between Modernism and postmodernism, with the problem of identity formation and character shaping his distinction between High Modernism and Late Modernism. Wilde argues that “with the thirties…there is a noticeable, if somewhat ambiguous, shift to surface” (278) with regard to E.M. Forster’s sense of character and personality in Aspects of the Novel. Such a distinction is common in criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, in particular with regard to a vision of Modernism as utopian or recuperative and the postmodern as post-ideological and non-teleological. Subsequent work moved in a Marxist direction by looking to Late Modernism as a transitional period between the modern and the postmodern, whether within different stages of late capitalism or through the impossibility of not periodizing. In either case, the humanist construction of order faces the anti-humanist sense of personality as a product of material conditions and of order as an ideological imposition rather than a protean found or natural aim. Such a distinction has become cemented in much criticism, but is itself also a product of a particular manner of viewing the world that is antithetical to a very great many of the major works of the Late Modern period (or simply the generation that came of age during the 1930s and 1940s). This is to say, the necessary perspective on the subject and on historical periods in a telos in these critical paradigms is itself a contradiction of the anarchist views promulgated by the generation I have identified as personalist. Marx’s notion that social being determines consciousness runs contrary to the anarchist-cum-personalist perspective articulated gracefully by Tom Morris: [1]

Immediate embodied engagement of wo/men and nature, desire, need, memory, hope circulating down through a singular lifetime, formed and moving in a common culture—this and not theory or reason or the dialectic or any principle of meaning whatsoever—is what once generated criticism and gives it its unideal, proximate, and humane sense of expectation and purpose. In this sense, the “personal” is the recollection of criticism’s grounding and terminus in individuated (that is, human) need. (10)

This highly personal form of criticism is difficult to reconcile to the mainstream body of criticism that would tame the works of the same period, and it therefore is entirely unsurprising that these order-oriented critical perspectives have generally failed to notice the existence of the counternarrative to their own paradigm.

In any case, these revisions of the New Modernist Studies or its immediate critical predecessors in the latter half of the twentieth century were prepared in the context of the pathways created by the major works of literary history written by the Auden generation poets themselves and their affiliates. Naturally, their own works, ideologies, and milieu shaped the critical terrain for the simple reason that the earliest critics were themselves of the Auden generation. Perhaps the most famous work, and still a profoundly (and justly) influential text, is Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation. My aim is not to cast an aspersion on a critical work that still stands with much influence forty years after its publication. Instead, my suggestion is that its critical perspective is shaped by those whom it considers as well as the critical resources they made available. Stephen Spender’s autobiographical works and in particular his criticism—The Struggle of the Modern and The Thirties and After—cast a significant shadow as well. To this body, Bernard Bergonzi’s fine Wartime and Aftermath and a myriad of articles also contribute. Each of these works has as a defining trait a strong tendency to view Modernism and Late Modernism through a perspective developed from the High Modernists and the Oxford Poets (MacSpaundays), and by and large limited to their ideological and theoretical scope.

These trailblazing works accomplished much needed expansions of discourse, but they also came with a clear series of limitations and occlusions. To ask Spender to investigate “the 1930s and after” with an unbiased inclusion of the personalist authors whose works ran contrary to his own shifting perspectives is unrealistic—the anarchism of the New Apocalypse, the Personalism and individualism of the Transformation and Poetry London authors, and the refusal to attend to the Audenesque “struggle” in the Personal Landscape poets cannot be reliably understood from Spender’s subject position as a participant in the period. [2] Hence, these personalist groups do not figure. Whether we consider the leftist Spender prior to the Spanish Civil War or the Spender disillusioned with communism after the late 1930s or even a liberalist Spender, each moves within a paradigm that accepts the function of authority and power as well as the individual within the social framework in a manner that runs contrary to the personalist generation. It is therefore no surprise to find that Spender affords virtually no mention to any writers of this group, and with the likes of James Meary Tambimuttu and Poetry London, very significant misconceptions occur.

Such misconceptions are important since they demonstrate the already-established critical paradigms, and more importantly, they went on to shape the development of scholarship. For instance, Spender argues, “The thirties was the decade in which young writers became involved in politics. The politics of this generation were almost exclusively those of the left” (Spender, Thirties 13). This is certainly true, especially for Spender’s generation, but what this “left” implied roused serious debate as the 1930s wore on. Spender’s perspective is made more clear as he moves forward:

With the end of the Spanish Civil War it became clear that the thirties were being wound up like a company going into bankruptcy. The departure of Auden for American in 1939, whatever personal feelings it aroused considered as a public act[,] only underlined what most of his colleagues already felt: that the individualist phase was over. From now on, people did not join anti-fascism as individuals who might influence history. They joined armies in which they were expected to forget that they were individuals. (Spender, Thirties 85)

As Graham Sutherland notes for Spender, “If 1937 had begun with Forward from Liberalism, in 1938 it was backwards from communism all the way. The Marxist God had failed” (233). This binary marks Spender’s perspectival frame. A Herbert Read or Henry Miller figure would note, in contrast, that not only are the politics of the “left” open to the unpolitical, but that the conflict between fascism and communism in Spain carried a serious third perspective: the Spanish anarchists. The anarchist’s anti-authoritarian antithesis to fascism’s authoritarian devotion to centralized power opens an alternative body of discourse outside of a binary between capitalism and communism. While organization, economic disparity, and class would be of concern, anarchism persistently views them through a paradigm concerned with authority. Moreover, Auden’s departure marked the rise of a distinctly individualist phase in English literature that self-identified as such, even as its main exponents served in armies or the air force. For this simple reason, the large body of war poetry and the prominent publications on personalist and anarchist materials escape Spender’s notice, not through some sense of malice or as an attempt to shape literary history (one would hope), but simply because they were uninterpretable within his critical paradigm: errata to his message and false cognates to his lexicon.

Spender goes on to recount his position in a manner that makes visible the position from which he observes. As he recalls one of his own essays, “A Look at the Worst,” from Horizon in September 1940, he reveals the nature of his exclusions and the occlusions of his perspective by admitting to only one form of individualism (bourgeois in Caudwell’s formulation) and by aligning anarchism with corporate fascism, which can only be regarded as a willful misunderstanding rather than a reluctance to agree with anarchist views:

while in the democracies people talk about, and even practice, ideals, [he argues] at the same time they are at the mercy of the anarchic and ruthless and irresponsible materialism of business interests controlled by “individualists.” These respect the interests of their country and of democracy no more, when business is threatened, than they do those of the workers. (Spender, Thirties 93)

Looking back on these comments, Spender evaluates his earlier ideas and maintains their interpretive schema:

Although attacking communism, I distinguish between communist and fascist tyranny, seeing in communism a kind of Christian heresy which, whatever the character of the dictatorship, still maintains socialism as a fundamental criterion by which its success or failure will be judged, whereas Nazism has no values except the furtherance of the power of the state. (Thirties 92–93)

The possibility for “anarchic” individualism, a vision of the individual that does not deny the social yet does not reduce the same individual to the social either, remains outside of Spender’s frame. From Spender’s position, the conflict is between dictatorial regimes and liberal democracy in the state, and liberalism answers the plagues of modernity within that state structure. The authority of such liberalism, however, is not itself susceptible to the rational subject it posits.

In this context, Spender’s oversight of the array of 1940s “individualists” who were not amenable to the interests of capitalism nor the power of the state makes sense. Such individualists were not within the realm of possibility in his interpretive schema, and hence those who voiced such a position were not intelligible and did not appear in his work or else appeared under the paradigm of bourgeois individualism or bourgeois freedom.

This is not, however, a critique of Spender’s very fine body of work. Rather, this is the beginning of a critical trend that reflects the politics of the postwar period and the generations that were in positions of authority to produce its histories. Spender’s works, though not standard critical fair after the widespread acceptance of Hynes, Jed Esty, or Tyrus Miller, helped to establish the focus of these subsequent critical works and bridged the “insider’s” vision to the critic’s analyses. In this, we then find Bernard Bergonzi and Samuel Hynes adopting several of Spender’s paradigms.

While Spender openly disregards other movements (Thirties 13, 85), [3] Bergonzi does fleetingly note the Cairo poets of this personalist generation in Wartime and Aftermath. Yet his main concern is, symptomatically, that G.S. Fraser, a Scottish poet stationed in Cairo during the war, makes a simplified distinction in his critical writings between the poets in London and those in Cairo. After this single paragraph, Bergonzi drops the topic from the book without discussing Tambimuttu’s Poetry London, the preceding Villa Seurat group, or the New Apocalypse and subsequent New Romantics. This is illustrative. The work in question for Bergonzi’s comments is Fraser’s “Recent Verse: London and Cairo” in Tambimuttu’s Poetry London, published in 1944 (215–19), but the critical perspective reveals Bergonzi’s tendency (from Spender’s established lead) to place London as centre with the Auden group as the “London poets.” Fraser had already published on this topic in Personal Landscape (Cairo) and in the London anthology The White Horseman in which he focuses on the New Apocalypse ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Late Modernism Inside the Whale
• 2 Narrative Itinerary
• 3 Authority’s Apocalypse
• 4 Rereading and Recasting
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author
• Other Titles from The University of Alberta Press